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Daniel Glick
I Definitely Inhaled

In 1970, when I was fourteen, my mom and I had a “theoretical” discussion about marijuana. Sitting at the kitchen table, we exchanged stories about what “people said” it was like to be high. She volunteered that she had heard some people got “cotton mouth,” when an area from the lips to the larynx felt like it had been drained of all fluids. I countered that I understood some people got “the munchies,” an uncontrollable urge to empty refrigerators and pantries of all nutritional content.

After the conversation, I recall wondering why she knew so much about it. She probably wondered the same about me.

Soon after our chat, my dad’s parents arrived for a visit, and my mom’s tension level elevated in direct proportion to the approaching hour. (She didn’t get along with my grandmother.) Just before my grandparents arrived, I made a fateful decision. I walked into my mom’s bedroom and offered her a package wrapped in a ribbon, which she looked at quizzically.

“It’s my last joint, Mom,” I said. “But you need it more than I do right now.” …

Excerpted from I Wanna Be Sedated: 30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers Copyright 2003 by Daniel Glick